A Giant's Dreams

“When I was in my 20s, I thought I had life figured out,” Brad Bird said when reflecting on his younger years.

“And right about that time, life said, ‘Oh really?’ and smacked me in the face."

Ever since he was just a child all Brad wanted to do is be an animator and at just 20 years old that dream came true in a big way. After just 2 years of college, he accepted his dream job with Disney.

But it turned out, this wasn’t the same Disney he grew up inspired by. The legendary artists who worked on films like 101 Dalmatians or Beauty and the Beast had all retired and been replaced with insecure supervisors.

So after a few disappointing years, Brad was fired from Disney.

Disney was so central to animation at this time, so Brad seriously considered quitting animation as a profession altogether. But after some thought, he decided to pitch some of his own films to other studios.

But it was a total failure — Brad was denied at each meeting, the main reason given to him was the very reason he considered quitting: if it isn’t Disney, it has no chance.

Brad was now at rock bottom… or so he thought.

Brad persisted, and ended up finding good work, one of those jobs being with the Simpsons.

But in his personal life, something happened that would fundamentally change Brad:

His sister was shot and killed by her husband.

When reflecting years later about the incident, Brad wraps the tragedy of the event up beautifully:

This tragedy changed Brad, at first for the worst.

He hardly remembers the next few years, aside from some work with the Simpsons that he recalls fondly. But nonetheless, it’s telling that Brad never quit his work despite all the times he threatened to do just that.

Animation was the only job he wanted ever since he was a child. It was the vehicle he used to express his deepest desires, and I like to think that he felt that he had yet told the story he was born to tell.

So when the executives at Warner Bros approached him with a pile of projects to choose from and direct, one stood out to him: The Iron Giant.

It’s based on a children’s book by Ted Hughes, the husband that survived the late Sylvia Plath when she took her own life.

The theme of the book, and the film he would eventually direct, was “being in pieces and pulling yourself together again.”

The book, after all, was written by Hughes as a way to ease the burden of Sylvia’s death to the two children that survived her.

These are all things Brad felt with the loss of his own sister, so he felt that he could add something meaningful to the story and make it a great film.

And when thinking about the story in relation to his own tragedy, he had an epiphany that became the famous pitch that led to the film being greenlit:

“What if a gun had a soul and didn’t want to be a gun?”

It’s provocative, and doesn’t have a clear answer. It is personal and meaningful and mirrors the senseless tragedy that surrounds much of murder and gun violence.

Just 2.5 years after beginning production, Brad Bird and his team completed the masterpiece that is The Iron Giant.

And despite being a box office failure, the reviews were excellent and the film is still considered a true classic in the genre of animation.

No one wishes for hardships, loss, or heartbreak, but they all come anyway.

Even the production of The Iron Giant itself was riddled with shortened timelines, technical challenges, and budget cuts.

But it was not for nothing.

“By the end of the [making of] the movie, everyone was much better than they were at the beginning. Me included!” Brad Bird said years later.

The story, or rather, the making of the story, healed things in Brad that could not have been repaired any other way.

Since pain is inescapable, people do not succeed despite their pain, but through their pain.

As Marcus Aurelius wrote long ago: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Or, as Ryan Holiday has simplified it:

The Obstacle IS the Way.